Cat’s face crumpled, cybernetic eye glittering. For a moment, Pru thought the engineer might slap Alex clean across the face. Or fling herself into his embrace. Even odds. He held himself open toward her, arms splayed and chin lifted, as if he’d welcome either touch.
Cat angled away from him to round on Pru instead. “Wasn’t this the entire point of you?” she spat. “Rebelwing was never meant to imprint on you, but she did. You should have been good enough by now. You should have been ready to pilot her alone, but instead you cling to Alexandre like a coward. If he dies fighting, it’ll be your fault.”
“Don’t you dare take this out on her!” Anabel strode between them, the very picture of the ice queen. “When you don’t let your assholery get the better of you, you have one of the best analytic minds behind the Barricades. Pru’s been a combat mech pilot for all of six weeks. If you stuck her in the dragon’s cockpit alone and tried to ferry her behind enemy lines on a real mission right now, she’d die before she got anywhere close to the alpha.”
“I can’t actually tell if you’re insulting me or defending me right now,” Pru informed Anabel. She’d started twisting her hands together again.
Anabel, bearing down on Cat, continued as if Pru hadn’t spoken. “You saw what happened on the beach. Alex is still one of the best pilots we’ve got, and the only one who knows the inner workings of the dragon as well as you do. Pru can map her imprint onto him, which means they can share the cockpit. Her bond, his piloting skills. Meanwhile, I follow in a transport mech, with a plasma rifle at the ready.
“If something goes wrong, if they hit Et—if they hit the alpha, but miss the alpha cell, and it survives long enough to turn Alex into . . . what you say, I’ll be on standby. A plasma rifle won’t be strong enough to destroy the cell for good, but it’ll be enough to . . . to kill the new host.” Anabel swallowed a visible knot. “The alpha cell would remain a threat, but losing two hosts in rapid succession should buy us more time to shut it down. I hope we won’t need it. But we should plan for it. It’s the best strategy for a bad situation.”
Cat pressed her mouth together. “Yes. I did see what happened on the beach. And I remember what happened in the cabin, to that man who turned into a wyvern.” Her regard was a spotlight, Anabel enveloped in its glare. “I understand why you’re here. If Alexandre might require an executioner, better to choose a tried and true killer.”
Cat pivoted away from Anabel, body language dismissive, but when she spoke, her voice had returned to frosty rationality. She might have been delivering a schoolroom lecture. “I have finished uploading the specs Alexandre requested on Rebelwing’s current capabilities. There’s no further purpose for my presence here.”
“Cat,” said Anabel. A question, an order, a plea.
Cat walked out of the room. The door clicked neatly into place behind her.
Anabel’s manicured fingers clenched, and unclenched. Pru waited for Anabel to go after Cat, to follow and explain and make things somehow all right again. But Anabel didn’t move.
Heart stuttering, Pru made an aborted move toward Anabel. “This was wrong. I shouldn’t have dragged you into my mess. You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do.” Slowly, Anabel’s gaze lifted from the closed doors toward the corner where Alex stood, watching his friends quarrel over the right to kill him. “I really do.” Her voice broke. “Don’t I, Alex?”
Alex closed his eyes, and the distance between them, with two long, shaky strides. His hands landed on either side of Anabel’s shoulders. As a pair, their figures cut jagged shadows against the city lights filtering through frosted glass. Never had Pru seen two people stand so close together and look so lonely at the same time. “Yeah,” said Alex. “Yeah, you do. I’m sorry. And grateful.” Over Anabel’s shoulder, that ineffably dark-eyed gaze snagged on Pru. “To both of you.”
Like Pru and Anabel had agreed to help him move into a new dorm room or something. Pru’s gut lurched again, threatening to expel its contents.
But already, Alex’s attention was shifting away from them. “We need to discuss strategy.”
Hakeem Bishop, still standing in the shower of light through the window, offered them all a grim smile. “Let’s get started.”
15
DIFFERENT KINDS OF BREAKING
Jellicoe’s wyverns would be delivered to the Executive General on a Saturday. The date coincided with Jellicoe’s own departure from the continent. “We hit Jellicoe’s compound in the morning,” said Anabel, who’d either bribed or blackmailed—at this point, Pru was afraid to ask which—one of her cousins in the intelligence services for the logistics. “His resources and most of his staff save a couple goons have already been stripped and distributed among the other UCC execs, which leaves him vulnerable, and his labs unguarded. That gives me the perfect opportunity to sneak in and destroy the main blueprints for the wyvern flock—and the alpha cell—so some other bastard doesn’t get the bright idea to try rebuilding these beasts.”
“What about electronic backups?” asked Pru.
Anabel’s mouth thinned. “I was going to ask Cat to take care of them, originally. Obviously, that’s not currently viable, so Cousin Jinwoo from the cyber security department will just have to do his worst. Meanwhile, you and Alex fly Rebelwing down to the delivery compound to take on the alpha. The wyverns are packaged for delivery; that means they’ll be in sleep mode.” She offered her audience a grim smile. “Which leaves the alpha without the support of its flock. The one thing left to figure out here is our cover for getting past the Barricade checkpoints unauthorized.”
“Excellent point, Miss Park,” said Bishop, as he pulled up a hologram from his phone. The corner of his mouth tilted upward. The expression was not reassuring. “Certain cross-territory deliveries go out on Saturday mornings, as it so happens. The off-the-books kind. Since you’ve had a hand in implementing the program, Miss Park, I believe you’re aware of which ones I mean.”
Anabel made a slightly strangled sound.
Pru took a long, doleful look at the contents of Bishop’s hologram. “Wow. Not really pulling the social propriety punches on this one, are you?”
“In the defense of democracy,” Bishop countered, utterly unrepentant, “we all must sacrifice. Clutch all the pearls you like, but you did sign up for whatever this plan called for.”
Which was how, at ass o’clock on a Saturday morning, Pru got stuck buttoned up to the neck in a heavy military jacket, riding shotgun to Anabel while the latter piloted a squat little transport mech up to the city walls.
“Halt!” The Barricade intercom crackled over the mech’s loudspeakers. “Identify yourselves.”